The Email Wars

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has created what they are calling the world’s first code of conduct for ISP’s and email service providers in their fight against spam. The Internet Industry Spam Code of Practice, created in cooperation with Australia’s Internet Industry Association, mandates that ISP’s tell their users how to deal with spam, provide spam filtering options, and provide a system for handling spam-related complaints.

Under the new code of conduct, ISP’s are responsible for addressing spam problems on their own networks, whether they’re human spammers, virus-infected spam-propagating ‘zombie’ computers, or just poorly configured email servers. The code also suggests best practices for preventing and detecting spam, which includes adhering to email authentication standards, control of automated email account registration, and proper record keeping.

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It is interesting to see that Portals and ISPs that are the ones trying stop the flood of spam are also part of the problem. I see 100s of emails a day that some from AOL, gMail and other ISP accounts and wonder how they can patrol the emails being sent by users. It takes moments to set up a new Portal email account and it is really based on trust. A spammer could ultimately set up as many of these accounts as they wish and continuously switch and kill one account after another. This has caused some of these ISPs to be on the blacklists themselves. And then that impacts the delivery of your own personal email.

I have recently seen this problem with Yahoo mail and the delay in getting messages from friends that use it for personal email. The delay on delivery can take from 1 hour to 24 hours. Not too good when you need to move a personal message.

Maybe we all just need to go back to picking up a phone for time sensitive communicaitons.

In another privacy flap, Google email riles spam fighters

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Last month, Matthew Schwingel became collateral damage in a low-grade conflict between Google Inc. (GOOG) and a handful of spam fighters.

Important messages the former Bank of America trader sent using Gmail, Google’s free Web-mail service, went missing over several key days while he and his partners were setting up a new fixed-income trading firm. The delivery problems forced Schwingel to spend hours making sure messages were received and business was getting done. They also sent him back to Hotmail, the service from Google’s arch rival Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), until his new company’s email got off the ground.
“Just knowing one of your emails didn’t go through makes you worry about the last dozen you sent,” Schwingel says. “I don’t mean to bash Google - I love the company and their products - but email is a sensitive item….It’s a commodity that’s expected to work 100% of the time.”

The problems experienced by Schwingel and possibly thousands of other Gmail users are a consequence of Google’s sometimes-hawkish policy on privacy. In an unusual practice, Google makes Gmail users virtually anonymous. That’s led some spam blockers to occasionally blacklist entire Gmail servers, the massive Google computers that hold many Gmail accounts, because they can’t separate the spammers from the legitimate emailers.

‘Ticking People Off’
Some publicly available black lists, including the widely used Spamhaus list, have a hands-off approach to Gmail to avoid blocking legitimate email. Others, most notably IronPort Systems Inc.’s SpamCop, aren’t willing to give Gmail a free pass.

“Gmail has taken an extreme position on privacy that inhibits the antispam community from doing their job, and it’s ticking people off,” says Tom Gilles, co-founder of IronPort.
Some 10% to 15% of the spam IronPort sees comes from free Web-mail accounts, too big a slice to turn a blind eye to.

“From time to time, Gmail mail is getting blocked because spam is leaking out of their service,” Gilles says. “Sometimes the babies get thrown out with the bath water, and that is the rub.”

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I read this today wondering what impact this has on the send to a friend implications of many campaigns we see out there. The case below looks as if it was pretty misleading to the user and they then used those S2F email addresses to target with emails that we not “opt in”. Not a good practice in general.

As we have seen lately with the Career Builder Monk E Mail campaign, they send it from the brand “CareerBuilder.com” but the subject line is a dynamically generated one like “Jim Smith as sent you a Monk E Mail”. As long as you are not capturing the email addresses for future targeting and only directing these S2F emails to opt in for the offer you should be follow these best practices guidelines.

What are your thoughts about this and have you used a S2F campaign that is similar to this?

Record Spam Fine by FTC against Jumpstart

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week fined Jumpstart Technologies with a $900,000 civil fine - the largest-ever penalty for violating the CAN-SPAM Act, reports Internet News. The FTC said Jumpstart violated the law by disguising its commercial emails as personal messages: It forged the address in the From line and made it appear as if a friend of the recipient had written the email (it acquired names and email addresses via a promotion). The FTC’s complaint also Jumpstart misled consumers about the terms and conditions of the promotion.

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I really like this approach. It basically let’s the marketer put a 5 cent bond in place to garuntee that they are not sending spam. If they pass the test and are not sending spam, then the cost is nothing. It is a bond. But if they are indeed sending spam, then they lose the 5 cents. Simple enough and does not take money out of the pocket to garuntee delivery. Good idea.

But here is the chink in the armour. With all of the ISPs and portals placing a “THIS IS SPAM” button in the email client, they are actually encouraging someone to flag it and thus take that nickel. What needs to happen to make this model successful is to better educate the end receiver about the impact of reporting false positives or simply flagging emails that they opted into as spam just to try to get it out of thier inbox. Maybe a system that sends feedback loops to the company or ESP to give them a 72 hour window to prove the opt in relationship with an IP address, date, time stamp and web page that they opted in from. This would create a format that would indeed give the ability for marketers, ISPs. ESPs and the end consumer to start to place some controls on what really is spam or unsolicted email.

We will see how this plays out.

Artilce/Source
Marlborough firm pushes payment system to cut spam
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

Yahoo Inc. and AOL hope to clean up their e-mail systems by charging senders a fee for each e-mail sent to their subscribers. It’s a radical, controversial idea — and, Phillip Raymond says, a lousy one.

It’s not that Raymond, chief executive of Vanquish Inc. in Marlborough, is averse to charging for e-mail.

”We think that the idea of using economics is long overdue,” he said. ”It is the only way of getting to the heart of the problem.”

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For those of you that read this regularly, I will be traveling Sunday to Tuesday to LA for the annual OMMA West conference. If it is an event you do not attend now, it is one worth your time. Mediapost started this event 2 years back and it is one I look forward to each year. It is not just about email, but about the web and how marketers are using it and hope to use it.

Cheers

I wrote this article last week for another publication and thought it might be valuable to share on this blog. It really covers some of the campaigns we create for our customers. We do alot of social media/blog/Direct to Influencer campaigns and this article talks to that. Not a overall solution or battle plan, but it will give you a little background.

Of course email and lead capture plays a role, but there are so many other facets that must be done in order to be successful.

Think back to 1999 when we were all going to change the world with the internet. Sites and ideas sprang up overnight and leapt into the media frenzy on a daily basis. The media controlled the game and companies had to pay dearly to leverage the saturated pages of every offline vehicle to get their messaging in front of businesses and consumers. Now, flash forward to 2006, the tables have been turned to a method of consumers running the show. Everyone from your co-workers, children and parents have begun to embrace the world of consumer generated content, blogging, social media sites and word of mouth marketing.

Today we have many online vehicles to move our messaging across the globe in a relatively inexpensive way, but it also leads us into new, unfamiliar waters of relinquishing some control. This may be the hardest part of the entire movement; where people outside of your ad agency or internal marketing group can make or break your message.

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I think that the rest of us have decided to sit back and watch what happens with this whole hot button, but seems others just can’t wait to weigh in.

E-Mailers Cool Down on Goodmail, Lawmakers Heat Up
Though the controversy over AOL’s use of Goodmail CertifiedEmail has subsided in the e-mail industry, nonprofit and advocacy groups — as well as a state lawmaker in California — continue to express concerns. The latest opposition came last week from California state Sen. Dean Florez, a Democrat, who called for a closer look at the program. “It seems to me that AOL is setting a horrible precedent here,” Florez said.

Read more on DM News

So now the move is legal to hunt down and chase these spammers beyond our borders. It is about time. I am not sure how many asian character emails you get everyday, but I get pounded. They are totally useless to me and I would think that if they were going to be successful at least they would hire a translator. Speaking of, we are putting on a webinar in April with ViaLanguage about multi-language email marketing. If you are targeting outside of English, even in the US, you should make an effort to attend.

And now back to the news.

Senate Passes SAFEWEB Act
The Senate has passed the Undertaking Spam, Spyware and Fraud Enforcement With Enforcers Beyond Borders Act of 2005, which would establish new authorities for the Federal Trade Commission to fight spam, spyware and consumer fraud originating from offshore. The legislation passed by unanimous
consent last week. The bill now goes to the House of Representatives for consideration.

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We watch our own newsletter list for www.eroi.com pretty carefully as we like clean data. One thing I saw this AM was a new domain that I had not seen used before. I did a reverse look up and found that it is indeed a spam trap domain. www.exmaps.com. Sounds simple when you see it, like a mapping company, but it is actually SpamEx spelled backwards. Clever huh. I added below as to how spamex works. It is interesting to not that it is a simple system that guards the user. I like that, and tracks if the email address being registered with is sold, rented ot used anywhere else.

I have seen over the years, I think a better solution. This is to buy a domain, (Happy hour on domains for $1 today from noon to 2pm PST on Dotster) and just set up aliases using the name of where you sign up at (like eroinews@domain.com) and know you know if someone is using your email address for EVIL.

My takeaway for email marketers is to really watch the subscribers on a regular basis and use some filters for honeypots and spam traps. Or you may be letting spies and secret agents behind your lines.

About SpamEX.
Every time you disclose your Real Email Address, you lose all control over how it is used. You cannot MAKE someone stop sending you email or prevent them from disclosing it to others. Spamex solves this problem!

With Spamex you can:

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Read what our users say about Spamex

With Spamex Disposable Email Addresses you can safely provide a working email address to anyone and not have to worry about whether they will send you unwanted email or sell your email address to others

Learn about SpamEX

We are regular contributors on web marketing campaigns for iMediaConnection.com. We get asked to review new campaigns and would like to steer you to these from time to time.

This one focuses on fuse TV and was well done. Read our CEO’s takes.

Hip Humor Reaches Youth
fuse TV targets youth with a website that offers animation, comedy, downloads and music.

I love when I see that “adding a preference center” retains customers. I mean this should have been a staple of EVERY email campaign and system a marketer uses. I know the personal frustation level from so many major brands that continue to send me gender wrong ads and will not let me change. I don’t want to unsub from these brands, but give me a choice. Let me tell you. In emais sent monthly to 4 major online clothing retailers, only one has thus responded and actually changed my preferences, making me a happy customer and shopper. The others are driving me further away from wanting to shop with them.

Online retailers that let e-mail subscribers change their preferences when they opt out of e-mails can keep some of those customers on their lists, according to a new study provided exclusively to DM News.
Permission e-mail marketing firm Silverpop, Atlanta, reviewed 175 major retailers including J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and Crate & Barrel. It found that only 12 percent gave customers the chance to change their preferences in addition to simply opting out.

Providing a “preference center,” which offers other e-mail lists and asks for customer feedback, gives consumers a chance to rethink opting out, explain to marketers why they opted out or subscribe to one of the retailer’s other lists.

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Just got an email tonight from Microsoft alerting me to the new mobile version of the new Live Mail beta. As a 10 year user of my msn.com address, I can tell you that the new email clients (in AJAX) is much better and cleaner than most email clients. Not available to the general public yet, except bu invite, it is worth looking for and might make you ditch that AOL or Yahoo account.

I tested it on my blackberry tonight and it is fast and clean as well. Hats off thus far to the improved email client online and offline. Below is the invite (really leverages the velvet rope approach that Gmail used). I am curious to see how it impacts HTML campaign read rates (looks to be an HTML client on my blackberry) as well as how we interact with our mobile email.

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Another review we recently did for iMediaConnection.com. Worth a quick read as many people only associate eROI wil email marketing. We actually run a full service agency as well that helps deliver campaigns like the one reviewed below.

eROI CEO Reviews Nordstrom Silverscreen

Ecommerce Meets Entertainment
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Shopping and entertainment merge in Fallon’s Nordstrom BDA; audiences can watch remixed music videos, and buy the featured clothing while still within the video.

It looks like this whole Exact Target Study has grown legs and is taking on new twists of it’s own, like the one in block quotes below. It hit me as odd that anyone would release a study on the open rates of spam, and as it turns out people are just making up titles to benefit themselves. As you can see from my post title, I was shocked to see that people are reading spam. We learned today that many publications are picking this up and the Urban legend is growing. Oh the power of blogs and the web. They should have saved this for April 1st.

I found this bogus study amazingly interesting. We report (as do other ESPs now) on the best days to email. What is an interesting twist on this is a new report on the best days to spam. Basically they claim that this study focuses on when people are most prone to reading spam and opening it. This really boggles my mind that as much as people complain about it, they still are reading it. And as it turns out it totally bogus. They misinterpreted the study not as behavoir and delivery, but with a twist of SPAM.

Friday, Sunday top spam reading days

Friday isn’t just the beginning of the weekend, it’s also is the peak day for opening spam email, Kaspersky Lab said today.Sunday sees the second-highest amount of mass-marketing emails opened, the anti-virus firm said.

According to a survey conducted by email mass marketer ExactTarget, 92 percent of all emails - and 96 percent of all campaign emails - are sent during the workweek. However, while Sunday sees only three percent of all sent emails, links in those messages are most likely to be clicked then.

“This may be due to the fact that users receive much less spam over the weekend, so they are more inclined to click on links, something they would do less frequently during the week given the larger volume of email received,” Konstantin Kornakov said on the Kaspersky Viruslist site. “This theory is also supported by findings that smaller mailing lists tend to have better opening and clicking rates.”

Read the Bogus Article that references the Study

We have a client that is a Rock Band. Not the mega touring, hard rock, party all night long kind of band, but they jam no the less. It was interesting to see how they used our lead capture system to engage the subscriber to join the list. Watch for a few moments as one of the characters will cross the screen wearing a sandwich board with the sign up form. He just floats from the back to front across the screen and if you say, No Thanks, he goes away.

I think it is a creative and brilliant way to engage someone to sign up. Not a pop up or in your face tactic, just a subtle way to get new subscribers. Maybe you should try one of these in a different way one of your landing pages.

See the Method at http://www.climberpdx.com